


How Little We Really Know

by roundthatcorner



Category: The Beatles
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 22:30:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10773792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roundthatcorner/pseuds/roundthatcorner
Summary: 'Since you've gone, it's never right'; John and Paul and an early morning phone call, circa fall of 1976.





	How Little We Really Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stonedlennon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonedlennon/gifts).



> The title & summary for this are taken from the lyrics to 'Little Lamb Dragonfly'. 
> 
> This is dedicated to stonedlennon as an incantation to draw her back! And as well wishes, where ever she may be...
> 
> This story is kind of sad, so. I'm working on something happier as well, but this ended up bubbling out first. Hopefully it all makes sense. Also hopefully my interpretation of their possible sexual dynamic is acceptable to all-and-sundry, ha.

Whatever happened between them, Paul still knew John well enough to gather meaning from the hour of his phone call. Early afternoon was good, Paul knew -- that meant John was calling him during or just after he'd eaten breakfast, that he was up and active and keeping a schedule. It was bad to get a phone call from John in the early hours of the morning. Midnight or later meant that John had been allowing himself to stew on some topic all day – that he had goaded and girded himself into a fury and had now decided to unleash it, his anger calcified in preparation.

It had just ticked past midnight when the phone rang, only minutes before Paul would have unplugged it for the night and gone to bed. Paul was listening to the acetates he'd taken home that evening from the studio, the recordings that they were painstakingly scrutinizing and assembling from the American shows, intended for a double or maybe even triple album that would button up a triumphant tour. His own voice ( _why won't you call me, pretty baby? – you know I love you, baby)_ beseeched him, pulsing out from the credenza.

“Did you know...did y'know?” John snarled, and Paul tried to decide what John could be on. He got up to turn the music down. John did not sound drunk and this did not seem to be a drunken anger, so...coke was maybe a good guess, as good a guess as any. Paul knew John had been doing buckets of it in Los Angeles – had seen him doing it, snorting it in lines off of a T. Rex album. When John had been going on just a few months before about clean living and fasting with Yoko and how fulfilling it was to be a father and not need to be naughty anymore, Paul had thought _su-uuuure, mate_ , and figured John shouldn't be burning any bridges with his dealers. But it was not as if any of them needed drugs to hate each other, anyway; John could be completely sober, for all Paul knew.

_...tell me what can I do, what can I do?..._ Paul's recorded voice implored, low in the background.

“Did I know what, John?” Paul asked, wearying of the conversation before it began. He had decided, prior to the phone call, that he was done smoking for the night – he could never really figure out if it helped him sleep or not – but now he really wanted a joint, if only to give him something to do with his fingers and his mouth. Take a puff, compose your thoughts, then answer – he'd done it in press conferences with ciggies all the time. _Look at you_ , John would say to him back then, as if he couldn't believe they were pulling this off, _look at you,_ _spinning and spinning_.

“Did you know – last night, I was fucking my wife – trying to –,” John said, words bitten off with fury, “And I was thinking of you and how you used to suck me off like you _loved_ it, swallowing me down like you couldn't get enough of it --”

“Shut up, John, Christ, shut the fuck up!” Paul hissed, heart lurching, pressing his mouth into the phone in panic. Who knew where John was, who could be overhearing this?  
“No, you fucker, you need to hear this. You fucked me up -- you fucked with me head, you made me think of this _sick fucking shit_ in my fucking _marriage bed_ ,” John said, but he'd lowered the volume of his voice if not its searing intensity. Paul could imagine him, twisting and throttling the phone cord as he spoke.

“I didn't ...,” Paul said, trailing off when he realized he had no defense. He was aware it sounded pathetic, a nonsense denial: he had and he had and he had.

This, Paul thought, was some sort of karma, not instant (that would be _too bloody easy_ ) but a slow-crawl terror. For years Paul had sat back and watched John's cruelty turned on so many others, blithely assuming that it would not touch him. He had taken the laissez-faire approach in those moments because he could not be bothered to stop it, mostly, but sometimes it had been because he enjoyed it, letting John be a bastard for both of them. Now John's mercilessness was directed full bore at him, had been now for years on end, and he could only think, _I deserved this_ , and _how could I ever have thought I could escape it?_

_'Caveat emptor,'_ Brian had once told them, and then blushed when he had to explain to them what it meant.

“You made me want things that were never going to happen, that you were _never_ going to give me,” John spat.

“I only ever wanted to be in your band,” Paul said, trying to infuse his voice with a calm he did not feel. The possibility that in ten or fifteen years John would still be the person he would always want, but that they would hate each other, grimacing over the phone at each other into eternity, suddenly seemed very real. The disintegration of their relationship had been sent into motion years before and now moved with its own logic, powerful and agonizing and irreversible, beyond Paul's ability to stop it.

“Don't lie, Paul, you know you look so ugly when you lie,” John said, breathing deep. “I'm HAPPY. I'm finally _happy_ and you won't be able to ruin that.”

“Good. Good, I'm glad,” Paul said. He felt his eyes start to well up and looked at the ceiling, waiting for it to pass. Long before weed or meditation he would calm himself by thinking of bluebells in the springtime, the way they would spread up from Wales to blanket the fields from which Speke was being carved out. He wondered if the sadness in his voice translated over the Atlantic; he wasn't sure if he wanted it to, if it would matter. He said, “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”

“No, Paul, no,” John said, with a sort of chuckle that made Paul's jaw tense, “You wanted me to be happy _with you._ ”

Paul didn't know what to say, and John paused. Paul could only assume he was pleased to have him humbled, up against the metaphorical wall.

Because of course Paul _had_ wanted that, of course; he had never imagined anything else. His happiness had always been inextricably linked to being with John, and he had thought that this was yet another thing they felt in tandem. He hadn't been blind, back then – he had known that fame and drugs and suburbia had sent John off-kilter, that he was bored and restless and overwhelmed, but he had always thought that he could poke and prod John into happiness, a little adjustment or two necessary as they kept moving forward. If he could not let John move in with him full time, he could let him stay there night after night, taking the spot in Paul's bed that Jane mostly left vacant; if he could not prevent John from tipping into LSD-induced ennui, then he could take it with him, sometimes, and then try to distract and compel him with all the incredible people and art and music that were exploding around them and through them and because of them; if he could not undo John's unhappy marriage and premature fatherhood, then he could encourage him to at least do a little better. If they could not ever go _back_ , they could buy a refuge in the Aegean, an Eden before the fall.

They had joked then about needing an island far enough out that the journalists and fans couldn't swim to them, giggling together about dotting the shoreline with water cannons to defend hearth and home. But then they'd sailed there and John had rejected it, said he didn't like the vegetation, said it wasn't 'conducive'. _For what?_ Paul had thought, and then, _we can get a gardener._

That was the problem, or had been – Paul would look at something and see where it needed improvement and John would look at the same thing and say, _Tear this awful shit down_. And sometimes that was beautiful and redemptive and inspiring and sometimes Paul was the thing being torn down.

“Good songs, then?” Paul asked suddenly. The whisper of inspiration had chanced on him, murmuring into his inmost ear, and he seized it.

“What?” John asked. Paul could practically hear his eyes narrowing.

“The songs you're writing, mate. They're good?” Paul asked again. The thrill of being like John, of being mean and cruel, dragging each other into the dirt – he did not indulge in it often enough, probably, at least not towards John. Let John talk and bluster and whine and do everything but record good music; with a little hard work, Paul would hit number one with regularity and be better for it.

“Fuck you,” John said. He seemed to pause, Paul could hear him breathing for a second, and then the phone slammed down.

In the silence Paul remembered why he did not like to be like John: after you'd said your bit, swung the axe, there was no way to pretend you hadn't meant it.

Years before Paul would have been proud that John was unable to _not_ think of him while in bed with somebody else. He would have considered it a mark of intimacy, of ownership, a sign that the things they did together shaped them profoundly even when they were apart, so much that they could never truly be absent from each other. After Barcelona John had told him, as a sort of apology or just to make him laugh, that he had let Brian toss him off -- _But_ , John had said, he had needed to excuse himself to the bathroom because that was the only way he could finish, thinking of Paul and Paul's pretty mouth. Paul had actually laughed upon being told this; looking back he could not see if he had really felt it was funny or if he had laughed just because John had so clearly thought it was.

Thinking of this now was almost unbearable; their closeness no longer seemed like the most positive, fertile thing among all things but instead something that had rotted between them but still held them fast.

_Guess somebody really did you, eh, Johnny?_ Paul thought, and he did feel an itching, claustrophobic pleasure in that. Because John could rewrite him out of everything, downplay their history and his contributions ('the only thing you done was _Yesterday_ ') but John could not ever peel off his skin where Paul had touched him.

In his day-to-day life Paul tried to keep the memories quiet, left to roll over themselves in the back of his brain rather than at the forefront. But John's calls, whether good or bad, tended to send the memories rising up like dust from a long unused, now unsettled bed.

It had once been that even if John composed a song on his own, Paul would be the first to hear it, running his fingers across the lyric sheet as John sang it to him, or picking up the phone to the sound of John, already mid-whistle. By the time of 'Don't Let Me Down', though, John would come into the studio and spread his songs out like entrails or tea leaves, laying them down in front of everyone but waiting for Paul to read them. It did not take a psychic or even a guru to read this one, though – _you didn't love me enough but she does; you wouldn't give me enough but she will._ Paul had been sure his face was burning; it was the first day of filming and John was making certain he was cut down to size. He'd eventually excused himself to the bathroom and found his chest blotchy with color underneath his collar. He could never be for John a love that had no past; if that was what John wanted, he could not compete. But then the thrill of John's beautiful song, the excitement of getting to coax out John's genius had taken over, and Paul had felt that there was love in that, too.

_Nobody ever really done me_...Paul had bristled at those words when he first heard them, remembering how John's actions over the years had belied them, but Paul knew now that he could not trust his own memory of things. There were stories that he had retold so often that they felt lost to him. Then there were other stories that he had told hardly anyone, but that seemed lost to him just the same: twisted beyond recollection by the pull of what he wanted to believe versus what he could actually remember...like the four of them, stoned beyond belief in the Bahamas, wanking together, part boredom, part challenge...John had reached for Paul's dick and in the moment before George had said, “Christ, no, you two – I'll never be able to get that out me head” and started for the door, too stoned to be truly angry but clearly sickened and irritated, Paul had felt pride – or rather, satisfaction, the enormous, gratifying pull of being wanted by John, wanted by him beyond all reason or sense. But maybe that had not been _want,_ really; maybe John had just been showing off, pushing them, trying to see what they would withstand for him. Paul could definitely remember – _couldn't he?_ – the sound of John calling out “Spoil sport!” as George left.

Paul could know that he had not imagined John, in one or a million hotel rooms, sing-song saying, “Paul, Paul, Paul...come to bed, Paul” and also know now that whatever insight he had thought he had into John's mind was treacherous, a fucking siren call.

Another memory, uncertain as the last: John wanted to trip and Paul wanted to fuck. Or maybe John wanted both, tried to coax Paul into it, saying that they could plan for it, do it on the come down and it would not be too intense. Besides, Paul remembered John saying, he had not done this with anyone yet – a canny appeal to Paul's desire not to be outdone by rivals (Paul had not believed there were rivals, at least not then, not really; their names were linked on every shipment of their records, dispatched all over the world, in every language – who could ever compete with that?). But Paul had thought of his earlier trips -- the sense of unity with everything spiraling into exile from oneself, the clawing, obnoxious paranoia and disillusionment that came at the end, and he did not want that associated with what they did together, and refused.

They had argued, he remembered. He had told John to go home to his wife; John's response – 'Who? _Who_?' – was a throwback, a hollow pantomime of how he would speak to journalists about her in earlier years, when he had loved her enough to bother to keep his resentment at bay. The reply was so sad and small that Paul had not sent him off after all, though they had gone to bed in silence, each in his own head, arguing in glances. Paul remembered thinking that only John had the ability to make a bloke feel old-fashioned for wanting to have his cum on their tongue rather than a fucking tablet. But Paul had liked being old-fashioned sometimes, still did. Some things were old-fashioned and that was _good_ – Paul thought of Oscar Wilde and Whitman on Brian's bookshelf, the books Brian owned but never read, sitting on the side table while he scanned the charts and _Melody Maker_. Paul had borrowed the Whitman at one point, without Brian even noticing.

' _And what I assume you shall assume, f_ _or every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you_ ,' Whitman said. 'Song of Myself'. All Paul's songs had been Lennon/McCartney.

John had wanted for him to bring this shit back into his own marriage-bed, and of course John would get what he wanted. Paul was exhausted but he knew he could not let himself go to sleep. He did not want to wake up thinking it was 1963 and that the future was beautiful and forever.

Whether Paul went and sank into bed next to Linda and stared at the ceiling as the hours ticked by, or whether he stayed on the couch, watching the test pattern until morning came and he could pretend to do something worthwhile, John had poisoned the days ahead. Either way, Linda would find Paul in the morning with his eyes blood-shot, irritable. They would squabble over the perpetual subject.

Paul did not want to argue with her. Linda had only known John, strung-out and hardened to everything and everyone who was not Yoko; she had only known the John who would alternate between ignoring her and glaring at her, calling her ' _Mrs. Epstein-not-Queenie'_ in business meetings in the moments he would deign to acknowledge her presence. Linda did not have John-at-sixteen clinging to her heart, the John who had blown into Paul's life like Eddie Cochran and Marlon Brando and excitement made flesh, but better, _better_ , because he had chosen Paul, too. She could not know the way it had felt to shape John's fingers into E7 for the first time.

He remembered trying to tell her right after they had gotten engaged, looking down at his hands and hoping that she would not need him to say much more, because he had not known how much more he could say. Each word felt like his throat was trying to close around it, keep it secret.

“John and I...John and I – we – sometimes --” he had said, and because _sometimes_ did not convey the all-the-timeness of it, he had started again, wanting her to understand so that he would never have to speak about it again.

“John and I were – we talked about running away together, when we were kids, but we became famous instead...I don't know why...”

She had sat down next to him and looked at him, like she was not sure what he was saying. Her hand rested between them on the couch.

“The two of you...you are obviously really close, Paul,” Linda had said; he could tell she was picking her words carefully. The 'are' had been crushing, he remembered: she had actually never seen them close, closer than close. How could he have begun to explain it to her? For over a decade he and John had circled each other and cycled back to each other, again and again and again, and then it had been over and everything certain in Paul's life had collapsed into that void. Everything except for Linda, who he could not have known would become certainty incarnate.

“No, no...y'know, uh...we...I don't know how to tell you this – ”

“Was it sexual?” She had asked, preempting him. It was a wonder, even then, her ability to read him – this canny New York chick who could somehow see right through him.

He had overheard George once, at a party, declaiming to a journalist – it had been off the record, in the early period when they still trusted journalists to let them be off the record – about the hypocrisy of British society with regard to sex, and the Profumo scandal, and the euphemism 'making love'. He remembered thinking of John as George talked, and thinking that no, sex was sex, but making love was not a euphemism.

“It was not...just sexual,” he had told Linda, standing up so she wouldn't see his face, “I mean...it was more than that. I can't – I don't know. It was a lot of things...”

“Okay. Alright,” Linda had said. He had turned towards her, enough to see her nodding to herself out of the corner of his eye, as if she were trying to sort things out or put them together. A few days later they had decided to try for a baby, and that was it, somehow; he could never be sure how it had happened, how she had come to love him.

Paul wondered now if Linda's version of John was more accurate, if she could see him as he was rather than as he had been and would never be again. Paul had grown up with John, tangled into each other, and he could not be objective. He would never be able to shake the image of John, tucked into their little bed in Paris, saying ' _Put the camera down now, Paul – c'mere_ '. But the only John who now existed was the John who had dismantled his whole life, piece by piece, first through inattention and then with glee, turning his best friends and then the whole world against him. 'One and one and one is bloody _three_ , John', Paul had said, vis-a-vis Allen Klein, and John had smirked and put it into the song. This John had made George and Ringo choose and they had. Worse was that Paul couldn't blame them: even Paul would've chosen John, if John had let him.

Even the in-between _now_ and _then_ John who had scuffed his foot on the floor of the studio in Burbank, looking to Harry before asking Paul if he would like to drop by a jam session at his place seemed to have been erased. Paul remembered the crippling embarrassment of being turned away from John's door, scolded for not _calling first_ – that was Yoko or New York or something, John's newly invented rules, because it was not _Liverpool_ , not how they had been raised, and it was not Paul. But Paul had been stupid to show up that second night, so stupid to test his luck. What had he told John? _You could knock me down with a feather, yes you could –_ and then John had taken a fucking sledgehammer to him. Not once, but repeatedly, and yet Paul still wanted him.

John would say Paul was an optimist (if he were in a good mood – 'you and your fucking fairy tale bullshit' if he wasn't), but it wasn't that, not really. Paul knew he had to grit his teeth and choose it, choose to remember John before all this, choose to focus on the good bits; some people were born optimists and he wasn't one of them. Some people were pessimists, like John, sometimes, mostly, or Brian. And some people who he would have thought were optimists had surprised him; he thought of Ringo, carousing into oblivion in Los Angeles, and of Mal and Mrs. Caldwell, dead in impossible ways.

Yoko was the same as him, probably – pushing and pushing, always, cognizant of the descent. They were alike in a lot of ways; it was probably why it had been so easy for John to choose between them, swapping one for the other so quickly it had left Paul reeling. John had joked once, during _Get Back_ or maybe _Abbey Road_ , that he'd always liked black hair. Paul had had time to think 'No, you fucking liar, you liked Brigitte, same as me' before he'd recognized the joke, him and Yoko stacked up against each other. And then he'd been irritated, at John for teasing and testing him with this shit, and at the comparison itself, because at least he washed his hair and got it cut – but of course he hadn't actually been doing that much at the time.

Was it a Faustian bargain, when you got everything you had ever wanted but with a fucking curse attached? They had fulfilled every teenage dream they had patched together, a hundred or a thousand times beyond belief, and were now marooned together on an island beyond everyone and everything normal, resenting each other and themselves for having stranded themselves there.

Some kid, waiting at his front gate for an autograph, had told him once, his tone awed fervor and probably weed, too, that the Beatles had made him believe in a benevolent universe. Paul had said something like ' _oh, yeah, huh? Me too'_ and the waiting girls had laughed, as they laughed, preening, at anything he said. He'd said it lackadaisically, _ho-hum, that's us,_ but a part of him had thrilled with recognition. Some time later he'd told John about the kid's comment, sitting out by John's pool in Weybridge, suffused with sunshine and feeling contemplative and grateful and enmeshed in something bigger than himself. John had smiled, beatific, and said only, “How about that?”

Paul wished now that he had asked him what the fuck he meant.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So the line about running away together but becoming famous instead, I am slightly worried that I read that from someone else long ago (??)...but since I've searched through a ton of stories and can't find anything like it, I'm keeping it. I guess I need Alma Cogan to tell me one way or the other! So if you recognize it, let me know, and I will credit the person who came up with it.


End file.
